


The Convergence of Celestial Objects

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [2]
Category: DCU, Superman (Comics), Superman - All Media Types
Genre: Alien Cultural Differences, Car Accidents, Close Encounters of the Third Kind - Freeform, Earth-3, Ethics, Friendship, Gen, Humor, Mirror Universe, SCIENCE!, Science Bros, a brief appearance by elephants, bizarrely small because dc, luthor is an engineer at heart, space, the Cold War will not butt out of Alex's life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-18
Updated: 2018-03-18
Packaged: 2019-03-31 08:35:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13971324
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: Alex Luthor meets his second space alien. It doesn't go super well at first.





	The Convergence of Celestial Objects

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in 1979 btw. Khandaq is a fictional DCU country which is basically like an extra Egypt in Libya. They have an extra Nile called the Khandaq that flows out of the Sahara. Idk. Bialya moves around a lot; I've pinned it down to a big chunk of the adjacent parts of Niger and Chad.
> 
> Alex’s theme song is 'The Scientist' by Flux Pavilion.

Alexander Luthor, genius physicist and engineer, founder of a technology company that in five years had advanced from obscurity to major market share and showed no signs of slowing down, hummed contentedly to himself.

He’d be yelled at, when he got back. Told he was not expendable and you were supposed to hire test pilots to fly your experimental aircraft and _dammit, Alex, what do I tell the board if you explode in the stratosphere!_ But he fully intended to let them shout their piece and then do exactly as he pleased. Founding his own company, and putting in all the work and hard decision-making that had gone into building it up into a financial power, had been to _escape_ being at the beck and call of corporate sponsors.

As if he was about to let the thing he’d built to give him freedom chain him down.

The company _would_ probably suffer without him, but it would hardly go under. He wasn’t the entire R &D department, and he had plenty of good people directing marketing and all that kind of thing. Alex was not going to betray the dreams of the nine-year-old boy he’d once been and stop flying, just because there was a risk that he might fall.

Anyway, he’d left the stratosphere far behind on the second real test flight, once he was sure of the _Kopernika II’s_ ability to handle the jetstreams, and having since then confirmed the little ship’s ability to maneuver unimpeded by even the coldest portions of the mesosphere, was venturing further and further up into the thermosphere.

The stars seemed so close from this height, and yet never further away.

Next time, he promised himself, leaning back into the comfortable netting of the pilot’s seat. He’d take reentry faster this time, once he’d truly tested the acceleration at _this_ altitude, prove the heat-shielding was up to it, land safely, reassure everyone that he still hadn’t killed himself with his damnfool stunts (and really, if he’d survived fighting an insane superpowered alien three times now, did they really think it was going to be a failure of his own engineering that did him in?)–and then, next time, he’d take the upward plunge, achieve low earth orbit, take a while to appreciate freefall, and then maybe, if all went well…push just a little further. He didn’t have anything against Earth’s gravity well, but he wanted to try leaving it. For science.

Next time.

All he had to keep in mind, in the meantime, was to avoid being mistaken for an ICBM. He’d informed NATO about his test flight, through the proper channels, so they _shouldn’t_ take potshots, but he didn’t know exactly what  message anyone on the other side of the Iron Curtain had gotten, since he wasn’t enough of a moron to call them up directly, even just to ask them politely to not try to shoot him down. The witch-hunters in Washington considered him suspicious enough already.

And it wasn’t as though the Soviets were guaranteed to _not_ try to kill him even if the facts had made it through ungarbled, since he _was_ an American in a groundbreaking piece of technology. He was fairly sure he could evade anything they threw at him, but best not to have to try, on a test flight, even if it would provide valuable data. Best make it a point to stay well south of Russia.

He leaned right on the control column as the wine-dark Atlantic gave way to the Mediteranean below, inadvertent smile breaking out, as ever, when his _Kopernika_ handled like the dream she was. Still subject to normal physics in practically every way, but in the main rear engines, he thought he finally had his first breakthrough in the secret of Ultraman’s powers of flight.

It was really too bad it would be completely unethical to study the man while he was in captivity. He was utterly unwilling to give consent, and that was (frustratingly enough) _that_. But nothing was stopping Alex working with his observations, and he _would_ crack this. He would. Layering the five main string theory models was starting to give him some ideas about how it was _possible_ for the man to, more or less at will, exist as something approaching a _mobile fixed point in space_ , capable of ignoring Newton’s Third Law entirely in matters of acceleration, while still interacting with the strong nuclear force and even _gravity_ to a measurable extent, even if he resisted the latter with minimal effort. It definitely had to do with dimensions above the usual four.

Nearly all of those ideas were miles from engineering applications, but Alex’s head swirled with beautiful theoretical equations as he glanced at the altimeter (146 km; he’d dip up into the anacoustic zone once he caught up with the dawn) and pushed the _Kopernika_ up to Mach 18. Which, in a fluid medium as hot as the thin, thin gases at this altitude, was _very fast indeed._

Every time Alex saw Ultraman in motion, no matter how dire the situation, his first thought was still envy—he loved his machines, but to be able at any moment to leap into the air at will and _fly_ …of course it wasn’t true that _nothing_ then could chain you down, as Alex and the US government had been in cooperation proving for the last seven months running, but it would _feel_ that way.

Which probably would explain something about Ultraman’s mysterious life choices, to a psychologist; feeling unstoppable somehow leading to trying to conquer everything. Alex never could understand how a person could be Ultraman, with all his abilities and invulnerabilities, and want _more power_. Surely if you already had that much of it, you were free to take it for granted and move on to other priorities? But apparently Kal of the House of El believed power was the sole key to happiness, and considered the fact that he was not happy to be merely evidence that he didn’t have enough of it yet.

Getting so fixed on one theory that you refused to explore alternative avenues of inquiry was terrible science. Even space aliens should know that.

But Alex supposed not everyone could be a scientist.

Dawn was creeping toward the fifteenth degree of longitude, and he was racing east to meet it—distantly to the north he could make out the ragged coasts of Italy and Greece, and far beneath him the Sahara stretched blue-grey and quiet, flecked with human habitations like homely stars.

Alex swung out of the shadow of his planet, and the plexiglass of the cockpit automatically polarized, protecting him from the nearly-naked brilliance of the sun. He dove forward, drawing level with the golden front of daylight as it broke across the Kahndaq far below, a thin blue-black and green line through the brightening desert.

And then, the pounding of his heart almost the only thing reminding him that he was contained within a fragile cage of skin and bone, nosed gently upward.

The pure silence of atmosphere too thin to carry sound streamed around his capsule, and the true stars cut down like glorious knives, with no air left to make them sparkle.

And then, just as he reminded himself to breathe in, there came a massive, jarring, crunching _jolt_ and _had he hit a satellite?_ At this altitude?

…A really large, really tough satellite? Possibly the space station? (The space station ought to be nearly a hundred miles above him, and several thousand west, that was ridiculous.)

There’d been nothing on scopes, there was _still_ nothing on scopes, nothing in sight and yet he had heard and felt the impact all along the left side, and now he was rebounding and _Kopernika II_ had been sent spinning, parallel to the distant ground, and Alex forced himself to concentrate through the disorientation, suppress his nausea—this was what simulators were for, so you’d be _ready_ for this kind of thing—and try to regain control even as the main engines failed. At least the integrity of the cockpit seemed to be unbreached; his latest new materials improvements were proving themselves, and he was not losing oxygen or pressure and being forced to rely on his suit. Yet.

Then, as the view from the cockpit continued to flash sickeningly _earth-sky-earth,_ just as _sky_ appeared again for its instant, another craft shimmered into view: six or seven times the volume of his own; salmon and silver and deeply, obviously _alien._

There was a long, shallow scrape along one side, ending in a half-flattened spiky chrome protrusion, removing any thin shade of doubt that _this_ was the unseen obstacle on which his vessel had foundered.

Alex would have liked to take a moment to gnash his teeth or at least envy the cloaking technology, but he was still spinning, at enough Gs that in spite of the still-functional gyroscopic stabilizers in the cockpit he was going to black out any second, and without the main propulsion system the altimeter was already plummeting. The pink spaceship dropped away into the sky.

As his hands flew over the controls, trying to get the starboard burners to give him enough force to at least get him out of this tailspin, so the ejection of the cockpit had a chance of getting clear of _Kopernika’s_ doom, some level of Alex’s multitasking brain took the time to think, _Dammit_.

Because:

 _Either we’re facing an invasion by an alien race, and I’m not going to be there to help fend them off, or I just encountered my first_ friendly _aliens (albeit ones with poor driving etiquette) and I’m going to die without saying word one to them._

Wonderful opening to interplanetary relations, either way.

 _Not_ how Alex had intended to ensure his inclusion in history.

The spin was slowing, but not fast enough. Just as black fingers of unconsciousness started to reach across his vision, and he was reaching toward the ejection lever even knowing he’d more than likely be turned to paste before getting clear, there was a flash from the direction of the alien ship—and then everything was bubblegum.

 _Kopernika II_ spun to a halt as if through gel, and Alex’s stomach began to crawl back inside his abdominal cavity, while entirely too much of his brain elected to fixate on the fact that his entire field of vision had been dyed pink. He stared.

His ship was suspended in a beam of bright pink light, emanating from one of the spiky protrusions on the belly of the invading craft. _Tractor beam,_ Alex thought.

He _wanted_ one.

Hopefully the pink wasn’t a necessary consequence of the technology. Though he’d live with it, if it was. He’d been playing with this kind of thing in connection with his propulsion experiments, but it wasn’t ready for implementation yet, and—damn, he’d been looking _forward_ to figuring it out.

Never mind. He’d reverse-engineer this one, and then make it _better._

The aliens and their tractor beam descended fast enough that Alex could watch Africa looming large in his viewscreens, but considerably slower than freefall. If they continued to bear south like this, it looked like they were going to land in Bialya.

Good. The crash itself had taken place over either Libya or Kahndaq, and he’d met Black Adam twice, once in the midst of battle against their mutual Kryptonian enemy and once at a black-tie affair at which he suspected they had both been pretending not to feel out of place, but Alex would not like the third time to be after landing in the man’s country without permission, in company with a mysterious alien.

Queen Zazzala was intimidating in her own right, but _she_ couldn’t fly here at superspeed to interrogate him about his reasons for trespassing.

They settled toward the ground in a patch of savannah far away from any human population centers, which didn’t mean various radar scanners hadn’t picked up the descending pair of UFOs. They’d definitely been noticed by a herd of elephants about half a mile away. As soon as the pink light cut out, Alex hit the hatch release and scrambled out onto the tractor-beam-flattened grass.

Normally he would have found it hard to resist trying to go get a better look at the elephants, but the glimmering spaceship, with its bizarre post-modern design aesthetic, tall spindly landing gear, and propulsion system he couldn’t yet figure out, was far more riveting. Elephants were on Earth pretty much consistently, at least for now. He could go see them when he liked. Visiting space aliens were a limited-time offer.

The aliens didn’t match his hurry, and he had enough time to turn around, squint up at the sun, unseal his helmet and breathe in African air, and have a brief look at the damage to _Kopernika II_. He was just running his fingers mournfully along the crushed and mangled alloys where his left thrusters used to be, when a sharp _hiss_ of unsealing vacuum brought his attention sharply back around to the other ship.

A sort of…chute unfolded from the belly of the alien vessel, and Alex felt his heart pick up at the idea that the controlling intelligence might be amorphous, or tentacled, or…anything, really. The possibilities were restricted only by the laws of physics, and even those weren’t always as restrictive as they taught in school.

Ultimately, however, the figure that slid down the chute and landed on two feet was disappointingly but (given Ultraman) not _shockingly_ humanoid: tall and hairless, with skin a bright green, dressed in an even-brighter-pink, long-sleeved…leotard. Maybe it was only the contrast with viridian that made the garment seem vibrant enough to put the tractor beam to shame.

The pantsless outfit was finished with matching calf-high pink boots, wide silver bracelets, and a thick metal ring encircling the entity’s waist. Alex forced himself not to stare, because a) it was rude and b) the alien would probably assume he was staring at him for being an alien, which would _at best_ get him dismissed as a hopeless bumpkin, and he could hardly explain that he was actually having trouble believing that Ultraman apparently had _good_ taste in fashion, as aliens went.

(And at another strike against all logical assertions about laws of probability and the sheer _chaos_ of evolution. Alex was starting to lean toward the conspiracy theory that _something_ had a tendency to travel from star to star, meddling in the development of intelligent life, because that theory was less of a stretch than accepting that the profoundly irrational engineering of the human form, with its poor overburdened little feet and much-abused spine, had somehow arisen of its own accord _three or more times_ in unconnected gene pools.)

Was that diode-like pattern on the other driver’s scalp natural, or some kind of implant? And if not natural, was it cosmetic or functional? _Not staring._

“Thank you,” were his actual word one and word two, since he’d been given the chance to say them and really, common courtesy, and he’d prefer to make a good impression. Even if very possibly the not-particularly-little green man wouldn’t understand him anyway.

“You’re welcome,” was the unexpected response, articulated crisply in an almost-perfectly-normal and slightly grudging resonant tenor. “I suppose it was the least I could do.”

The hint of scorn in the alien’s tone prodded Alex right in the spine, just where Ultraman’s cold disdain had always sunk in. _Dammit,_ he thought bitterly, _they’re all alike._ Well, he wouldn’t back down from a rude fellow driver any more than from an aspirant conqueror. Luthor had no back-down in him; ask anybody. “Yes,” he agreed, countering with even greater frostiness. “I suppose it _was_.”

The alien’s eyes narrowed, even as he came out from under his ship and turned out to be some three inches shorter than Alex. “If your little tugboat didn’t steer like a sick whale cat _,_ there would have not been any problem.”

Alex stood a little straighter, maximizing his minimal height advantage, and glared right back. Damage his _Kopernika_ and then insult it in the bargain, would he? “Or possibly if _you_ hadn’t been carelessly flying an undetectable ship into someone else’s airspace without hailing, my ability to dodge _invisible_ objects in my _prototype_ wouldn’t have been an issue.”

“Well, if your planet _had_ any spatial authorities to file a descent plan _with,_ I would have done.” The alien propped both hands on the two-inch-thick metal ring at his waist, and poked his chin out judgmentally at the crippled experimental vessel. “And what were those thrusters? Are you actually relying on exploding lithium?”

Alex gritted his teeth. “When half of them haven’t been _scraped off_ by careless drivers, my ship maneuvers fine. And lithium hydride is a perfectly good propellant.”

“If you overload those thrusters you’ll produce stray tritium.”

“I’ve compensated for that,” Alex snapped. By setting them to cut out automatically if the secondary maneuvering jets got pushed far enough to produce neutrino bursts, mostly, and what kind of scanning technology did Terrible Driver McLeotard _have_ that he could tell how those worked without taking them apart?

“Well, you could _compensate_ for your terrible steering profile with gravitic stabilizers.”

Alex ground his teeth. _I haven’t figured out how to directly manipulate the strong nuclear force_ was not acceptable answer in the face of this kind of attitude. “The main propulsion system is experimental,” he bit out. “It’s basic sense to design the secondary systems along thoroughly understood principles.”

“Mmmmm.” The green-skinned being skidded his eyes along Alex’s wounded pride-and-joy in a cool, disrespectful manner that made him wish he was the kind of person who punched people in the face when they dismissed him. Ultraman represented enviable freedom in more than one sense.

(Until of course you considered the consequences that came with his lack of restraint, i.e. the fact that he was currently chained in an underground prison. Alex had admitted to himself, once the first capture was complete, that he would have had a hard time not resenting Ultraman even if the man _hadn’t_ been evil, because he really embodied very nearly every power fantasy known to man. He even had perfect hair.)

“It’s a pretty little skiff, isn’t it?” the alien mused.

“It _was_.” _Kopernika_ _II_ was sleek and silver-blue, aerodynamic because it was designed to dip in and out of the atmosphere, with geometrically ideal spreading fins and the rear of the fuselage shaped significantly more like the back of a classic rocket than it actually needed to be, because Alex wanted the thing to damn well say _spaceship_ to the unconscious mind of everybody who looked at it. It was moderately gratifying to know that he had succeeded on a level that embraced people who had grown up around functioning interplanetary spacecraft, and not just humans raised on NASA videos.

“I’m going to have to open her up before I try to take off again,” he added, “see what that impact did to the engine housing.”

Might be he was stranded unless the alien could give him a lift, but he didn’t think so; the blow had probably just split some soldering, maybe snapped a bolt, which had been enough to rip out some wires—Alex hadn’t fastened it all together nearly as soundly as he _could_ have, because he’d expected to take everything apart after the test flight _anyway_ , to make adjustments and see if anything was showing signs of wear. Inasmuch as he had actively analyzed the risk involved at all, he’d been sure what he’d already done would hold up to even extreme turbulence and figured that if he _hit_ anything on this flight, it would mean he’d already fallen out of the sky, so whether the engine was theoretically removable without extensive application of a blowtorch would be fairly immaterial.

Which he supposed had been showing great faith in the Russians’ not shooting him down, but he really didn’t think they’d have been able to manage it even if they tried. Whatever the green man said about his steering profile, by Earth standards the _Kopernika_ was too fast and agile to ever hit, as long as she knew you were coming. (Unless you were Ultraman, of course, though Alex thought he’d had reasonable odds evading even him, with sufficient warning.)

He was considering formulating a specific case of Murphy’s Law just for himself. It would be called Luthor’s Law of Aliens, and it would state that space aliens would _always_ appear in the most inconvenient place you _didn’t_ expect them.

Though really, if you were going to expect aliens anywhere, ‘most of the way to space’ really ought to be the logical one. His mistake.

“…you built it yourself, did not you.”

The grammatical error drew attention away from the tone, but Alex realized after a moment that that thoughtful question had been…surprised.

“Yes,” he said flatly. “I did. I’m aware you find it primitive but it’s the most advanced vessel my planet has yet developed, thank you.”

The alien stared at him for a few seconds, forehead wrinkled in an absurdly human expression, and then smoothed itself suddenly and the alien was back to being brisk. “Look here, I’m sorry. It _was_ my fault for getting in your way with cloaks up.”

A green left hand thrust abruptly out into the space between them, five fingered and proportioned a little broader than average, but structurally well within the standard variation of human phenotype, though without fingernails. (Ultraman, in a case of ridiculous redundancy, had fingernails.) “I’m Vril Dox, of Colu.” Yellow eyes flicked down to the outstretched hand, and up to Alex again. “This is the correct gesture, yes?”

For the sake of interstellar peace and science, and because his right arm was occupied with his helmet anyway so it was perfectly logical, Alex tugged off his own glove and accepted the mirrored gesture, and implicitly the apology as well. “Alexander Luthor.”

Vril Dox’s hand was a little cooler than his, and his skin smoother to the touch than a human’s, except at the fingertips, where it seemed harder and rougher. Alex didn’t add anything about where he came from because firstly, his planet of origin was obvious, and without knowing for sure whether Colu was a race or a planet or a corporation or a star cluster or what, he was most likely to just end up looking like a fool.

“And it’s usually with the opposite hand,” he added, gripping precisely as hard as he would a new business partner he did not quite trust, not that he expected Vril Dox to pick up that cultural subtlety just yet, “but yes.”

“What’s the difference?”

The tone as their hands fell apart was all bright interest, no challenge, and Alex could already feel his anger melting. There was something so utterly, indescribably _normal_ about bickering in the aftermath of a vehicular collision, catastrophe barely avoided; he half expected Dox to offer his insurance information next. He shrugged. “Custom isn’t the most scientific field of study,” he replied. And not remotely his specialty. “But that one seems to go back to when the right hand was the weapon hand.”

He waited to see whether that would get any Day-The-Earth-Stood-Still-type judgmental reactions to human barbarism, but Vril Dox simply nodded. “A trust gesture. I see. I’m not actually armed,” he admitted, disingenuous smile showing startlingly humanlike teeth. (No cuspids, Alex noted. Herbivorous?)

His _Day The Earth Stood Still_ thoughts now took on a different tone. Was it trust or confidence that would make a person standing alone on an alien world admit that fact so openly? Of course, it could be a trap, or a test. “Me either,” Alex admitted, shrugging. Oh, his _ship_ was; a few laser cannons and a green radiation ray he had high hopes for, because you never knew when you were going to suddenly have to fight Ultraman, but he had nothing on his person.

He rubbed the top of his head again. It felt especially smooth as compared to the diodes in his new acquaintance’s scalp…Dox’s English was suspiciously good for someone, even a brilliant someone, who was only vaguely acquainted with the concept of a handshake. “Did you learn the language from television? Please don’t judge my species by our entertainment programming.”

“My ship’s computer collated the low-frequency transmissions it absorbed while inbound, yes. I spent the past pair of planetary rotations assimilating the data.”

Alex had learned Hindi in a two-week seminar. He kept it in his rotation of ‘languages to practice,’ but he’d never quite managed to stop horribly mangling the more finicky postpositions, and had resigned himself to provoking laughter unless he ever had occasion to do a serious immersion study. Two _days_ after first encountering English to learn it this thoroughly…

Envying someone else’s raw intelligence was not an experience he had had very often.

He decided instead to focus on envying the man’s computers. “Our computers can barely take verbal direction in our own language,” he admitted. “How do yours work?”

“Well,” Vril Dox began, then paused. “Some of the terms I wish to use, if they exist in your language, were not in the broadcasts I harvested.”

“That will happen,” Alex admitted. “Advanced study tends to rely on personal contact here.”

“How very artisanal,” Vril Dox said in a tone of approval. “Anyway, I think I’d have to show you the systems to have any chance of making sense…trade you for a look at your engines?”

Alex was briefly speechless. But Dox didn’t seem to be mocking him, and—“You referred to gravitic stabilizers earlier as if they were off-the-shelf technology, I’m fairly certain you’re accustomed to working with much more advanced machines relying on similar principles.” And didn’t that burn, having all his dreams and glories reduced to a primitive footnote. Not as much as it would have if Ultraman hadn’t long since provided the evidence that there _was_ intelligent life in the universe that possessed the power of spaceflight and Alex was not the first intelligence ever to walk this path, but still.

“Yes,” the green man agreed, “I can tell from how your ship moved what it’s _doing_ , but I won’t know until I get a look _how_ you did it. And since you derived the principles independently it should be very interesting!”

It was hard to resent such earnest enthusiasm. Alex did make a point of first radioing home to make assurances of his continued survival and Madinat Bial to explain that he’d had a flight malfunction and made an emergency landing, and promising he was fine and meant no harm and everything was fine. He should probably also have told them there was an alien parked in their savannah. He didn’t. Vril Dox was waiting patiently.

Once he had the engines opened up Alex started analyzing the damage automatically, and by the time he’d finished answering Dox’s questions about the mechanisms he’d already accepted an offer to loan him some tools for the repairs, and they were on their way back to Vril’s ship to fetch them and have a look at his computers, and hopefully that tractor beam too.

The computers took nearly an hour, by the end of which the elephants had wandered over to examine them, which was an irresistible opportunity to examine _them,_ and frankly anyone whose life goals were not retroactively amended to include ‘explain elephants to alien intelligence’ upon having it happen to them was somewhat wasting the experience.

To be polite, he explained the alien intelligence to the elephants as well, although much more briefly since it was vanishingly unlikely they understood English. Or even Alex’s terrible Swahili. They seemed entertained by the process anyway.

Vril carried over two armloads of tools from his ship, some of which were obvious in application and some of which took a few minutes’ explanation, and one of which Alex turned out to be unable to use because its readout display was partially in bands of the light spectrum his eyes weren’t tuned to discern.

Which was a shame, since it seemed to be just the thing he needed to get the wreck of the port thrusters cobbled back together again enough to prevent landing back in Metropolis from being a study in chaos. (Now Alex was regretting filling half the runway area of the airstrip he’d purchased for the project with equipment—his ship might rely a lot less on angular momentum for liftoff and landing than conventional planes, but he hadn’t made enough allowances for what happened if it was _damaged_.)

In the end, Vril used the thing under Alex’s direction, to get the flattened tubing back into the correct alignment. A different device was able to test for soundness and potential leaks. Vril maintained his ship himself with these tools and had gotten here across interstellar distances without fatal malfunction; Alex was prepared to trust their capabilities to kludge his own ship’s systems into functioning for a mere intercontinental jaunt.

“I _could_ give your ship a lift back to your home population center,” Vril pointed out two hours into their work, as they were coming up on the local midmorning.

“Would you prefer that?” Alex asked.

Vril shrugged. “Hope you won’t be offended if I cruise alongside anyway, to catch your pod in case these thrusters blow.”

…he actually wouldn’t. “Don’t you have faith in our work?”

“As much as one _can_ in a patch job, I suppose. But safety measures first.”

“I _suppose_ those are important,” Alex admitted with overdramatized reluctance. Watched as it took Vril a second to realize he was joking, and grin.

So maybe the fact that they were hanging around Bialya to fix his ship up at all was ridiculously self-indulgent on both their parts. Alex had realized at some point as they worked that he had _never_ met someone quite so much like himself, which was of course a deep irony in that this was the second extraterrestrial he had ever met, and the less humanlike of the two.

It wasn’t as surprising as it probably should have been, though. He’d spent a long phase of his childhood, ages four to eleven or so, consuming vast quantities of science fiction intermingled with whatever real scientific resources he could get hold of, and had always identified strongly with the alien. The outsider. This was, he knew, perfectly normal. Precocity always set a child apart, and such a child without supportive parents to encourage a positive view of it usually felt _strikingly_ alien.

In some ways, Alex’s deepest resentment against Ultraman was _still_ the extraordinarily petty sense of personal betrayal he’d felt at having his childhood dreams of alien solidarity dashed.

But this, this was satisfactory.

It reminded him of first starting college, years ago; everyone older than him and he was still the most intelligent but it had _mattered_ less when so many of them knew things he didn’t and were willing to talk about them. He’d never felt less alone.

(Not that the succeeding semesters had been terrible and isolating; college had been an overall positive experience, but most memorable socially was the magic of the first semester, all the freshmen new and excited and reaching out to one another, even to the bald fourteen-year-old who had to keep explaining that he really did not have cancer.)

“How _do_ you manage your advanced studies?” he asked, while he made extravagant use of a laser-based alien spotwelder while lying on his back on the African savannah, because the nine-year-old he’d once been must have finally gotten his Christmas list processed or something. “On Colu? Is Colu the planet?”

“It is,” Vril confirmed, his voice somewhat muffled due to his head being inside the strange expanding alien toolbox. “We have modules, mostly—the kind of thing I used to learn your language. They’re very adaptive, it’s not necessarily as good as having a _really good_ teacher since the computer isn’t actually intelligent, but it’s better than a poor one and _much_ more efficient than trying to train an adequately large segment of the population to be very good at training other people.”

There was the sort of clunk that came from shifting a heavy wrench somewhat carelessly. “There’s this one political group always bemoaning the lost art of education, you know?”

“I believe I do,” said Alex, who found he had dreadfully mixed feelings on the subject. The futurist in him loved the idea of such programs, because there were so _many_ bad teachers, but on the other hand the idea of teaching as an obsolete art was outright depressing; a non-sentient program could never replace a real mentoring relationship. “Is that what your implants are for?”

“…Not precisely.”

The pause before this non-answer, and the tone of it, made Alex fairly sure he had overstepped, and he gripped the edge of Kopernica’s chassis and slid himself out because apologies should happen face-to-face, a belief he had adopted not so much out of a sense of decorum as because facial expression was usually a good guide to whether the apology was going well.

“They are for computer interfacing,” Vril was already explaining before he had a chance at ‘sorry,’ and if his tone of voice was still a reliable match for human, he wasn’t _upset,_ even if he wasn’t quite happy. “But they’re nonstandard, one of my father’s little improvements.”

Alex squinted. He shouldn’t ask. He knew he should not ask. He’d _just_ been nosy, and promptly regretted it.

He didn’t normally think of himself as bad at refraining from asking inappropriate questions, but that was really only because he preferred to conduct his own research. In this case, there was no alternate source of data.

“…improvements?” he asked.

Vril’s mouth tightened. Alex’s detached observing mind noted how it was an entirely recognizable humanlike emotive gesture, familiar beyond all reason, and yet at the same time little differences in shape and motion hinted at physiological dissimilarity. “I am a mutant,” he stated. “My intellect was artificially enhanced throughout my early development as a life-form. The implants constituted the final phase.”

The passive voice could not be a good sign.

“Technically speaking, I ought to be ruler of my planet since I have the highest tested Intelligence Quotient of all living Coluans, but since my father illegally engineered me everyone in government is busily bickering about whether my results are valid.” He shrugged, a smile slipping back across his face. “I slipped away to avoid the drama.”

Alex found himself picturing the world ruled exclusively by geniuses. It would be an improvement, certainly, but some of the highest IQs he knew belonged to individuals who couldn’t see past the ends of their noses. And of course there was the factor that while people who particularly wanted power shouldn’t be trusted with it, giving it to people who most certainly _didn’t_ was likely to mean actual power devolved onto whoever was ready to grab the reins. And shadow governments were never ideal.

“…that sounds difficult,” he said, sitting up because it seemed this conversation was going to keep him out from under the ship for at least a bit longer. “I approve of choosing leaders on a basis of intellect in general, but highest tested IQ doesn’t seem like it would necessarily correlate with leadership ability. Though of course I don’t know how your tests work,” he added, realizing as soon as he’d shared his analysis that it could be interpreted as a personal slight.

Vril didn’t seem offended. “The Coluan intellect quantification system is the most advanced of its kind,” he said noncommittally. “We have been improving on it for above two thousand years.”

“How does it weight psychomotor skills?” Alex asked, because he personally broke most human scales of intellectual measurement that he’d been exposed to, and was consequently very unimpressed with all their shortcomings.

The possibly-rightful overlord of Colu shrugged. “It doesn’t. Our current system replaced one in which we were ruled by abusive computer intelligences, and every so often someone argues that substituting the genius for the machine was insufficient change, but there has never been a serious movement to modify the process further. There is something to be said for a system which does not reward the will to power.”

“…do you think they’re changing it now?” Alex asked. And oh, that would burn, even if you had no wish to rule, to know that your people might be altering a system of governance millennia old specifically to reject you as their leader.

Vril shrugged, stared at the elephants. The pause drew out a little longer than was comfortable, when Alex didn’t have much work left to do. He lay back, slid back under his ship, and applied himself carefully to what there was. Including some cosmetic work that would just have to be undone when he got back to Metropolis, but he reasoned the less damaged _Kopernika_ looked the less alarmed his people would be, and besides any excuse to keep mastering the use of this laser welder.

Maybe Vril would give him a copy of the blueprints.

“This is nice weather,” Vril said when he came out again.

“Bit hot,” Alex demurred. He’d slipped out of his flight suit pretty early on as the sun kept rising, but his feet were sweating in his boots and he was going to get a sunburn soon if he wasn’t careful. He wondered if Vril was aware of the risk of sunburn.

Wondered if he ought to open up in reciprocation, talk about the father who’d ignored him rather than pushing him to excel. Explain the chemical contamination that had cost him his hair, and later having to go through endless tests to determine whether his genius had been unlocked by the poison, no matter how many times he’d insisted he’d _always_ been this way. If it would be reassuring to talk about the loneliness of being too smart and too young and never fitting in to even a passing glance.

If it would be presumptuous to say he understood what it meant to be expected to prove the validity of your very existence through intelligence alone, again and again every day, and the pressure that closed in at the thought of failing even once.

If he'd missed the window to confide in, at least for now.

“Is it?” Vril asked brightly, considering the temperature of midmorning in Africa with no shade. “Mm, you live further from your world’s equator, I take it?”

“Yes,” Alex agreed. “Metropolis, it’s up—did you assimilate our coordinate system?”

“I looked at it.”

“About forty degrees latitude,” Alex said, and sketched the approximate angle with his hands, before turning to check over their work on the thrusters one last time. “So, yes. I don’t know how it compares to Coluan architecture, but I’m building what I think is a very nice tower there.”

“Is it your oldest city?” Vril asked, suggesting he’d studied no human history or geography whatsoever while assimilating his language module. Some etymology in there apparently, though. _Mother of cities._

“Pft, no! It’s not even a hundred years old—it started as a concept city, for the futuristic rich to get away from the complications inherited from the past, like roads too narrow for modern vehicles and the poor. But you need people for a city, and industry, and a work force, so soon enough the poor caught up.”

He’d be deeply surprised if Colu operated on the free market, judging from what Vril had said so far. Kept his eyes intently on checking the firmness of bolts they’d already tightened twice. “Technologically Metropolis has stayed current ever since, for the most part, but the poor keep getting left behind.”

Tenements barely better than shanties, thrown together in the twenties and barely refurbished since. The wind rattling through the windows as radiators clicked and groaned and barely threw off any heat at all, in the City of the Future. “I’m doing what I can to change that.”

Vril came up beside him, passed him the magnetic wrench they’d reconfigured to handle Alex’s hexagonal nuts, reset back to its base settings to retighten the Coluan fastening Vril had produced to replace one that hadn’t survived the collision—there was no way to adjust these manually, since they were designed with the assumption one would have access to a matching rotating magnetic field just as hex nuts assumed a wrench. “Taking responsibility is important,” he said quietly.

“And pursuing what you think is important matters more than what other people think you should be doing,” Alex replied. Checked the fit of that last bolt, and handed the magnetic wrench back to Vril, who looked cheerful again.

“Well, it’s about time to see if we succeeded,” Alex said, closing that last panel and patting the side of his poor mangled _Kopernika._ “Come with? You can try out my hospitality, and help me convince all the respectable theoretical physicists that I’m right and they’re wrong.”

“Thank you, Alexander Luthor.”

“Oh, just Luthor is fine. Or Alex.”

Vril looked like he was going to ask what made those specific diminutives differ from Lex, Xander, Luth, Thor, Derluth, Lexa, Al, or any other cluster of phonemes you could pull out of his name. Alex would rather not get dragged back into amateur anthropology hour when there was real science and interstellar relations to work on, so he headed the question off with one of his own. “Should I use your full name? I’ve been thinking of you by only half of it at a time.”

“I am Vril of the line of Dox,” the alien scientist shrugged. “As you like. I have a…sort of a nickname, too; it translates as ‘Brainiac.’”

Alex laughed. “Tell me you didn’t give that name to yourself.”

Vril shot him a sour look. “I didn’t, as a matter of fact.” He hooked his thumbs inside the belt-ring and leaned back against the side of the ship in a lofty manner that implied to Alex that there was a _story_ there. “Contact your navigational authorities, then.”

Alex had to do some fairly careful maneuvering to file a flight plan for two spaceships from Bialya to New Jersey, without giving away that one of the ships was a UFO from space, and also without actually lying.

He was going to get formally scolded by the government later, he knew it. And probably owed Queen Zazzala lots of apologies and a formal introduction to Vril. But if in the meantime he could continue making sure that his new friend from space had a good, clear, _respectful_ introduction to Earth that in important ways completely failed to resemble _The Day The Earth Stood Still,_ it would very much be worth it.

**Author's Note:**

> This was Brainiac's original costume and appearance from when he first turned up and the word 'brainiac' was coined.


End file.
